The other chronicle of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella is that of Fernando del Pulgar, their Councillor of State, their Secretary, and their authorized Annalist. He was a person of much note in his time, but it is not known when he was born or where he died.[290] That he was a man of wit and letters, and an acute observer of life, we know from his notices of the Famous Men of Castile; from his Commentary on the Coplas of Mingo Revulgo; and from a few spirited and pleasant letters to his friends that have been spared to us. But as a chronicler his merit is inconsiderable.[291] The early part of his work is not trustworthy, and the latter part, beginning in 1482 and ending in 1490, is brief in its narrative, and tedious in the somewhat showy speeches with which it is burdened. The best of it is its style, which is often dignified; but it is the style of history, rather than that of a chronicle; and, indeed, the formal division of the work, according to its subjects, into three parts, as well as the philosophical reflections with which it is adorned, show that the ancients had been studied by its author, and that he was desirous to imitate them.[292] Why he did not continue his account beyond 1490, we cannot tell. It has been conjectured that he died then.[293] But this is a mistake, for we have a well-written and curious report, made by him to the queen, on the whole Moorish history of Granada, after the capture of the city in 1492.[294] [290] A notice of him is prefixed to his “Claros Varones” (Madrid, 1775, 4to); but it is not much. We know from himself that he was an old man in 1490. [291] The first edition of his Chronicle, published by an accident, as if it were the work of the famous Antonio de Lebrija, appeared in 1565, at Valladolid. But the error was soon discovered, and in 1567 it was printed anew, at Saragossa, with its true author’s name. The only other edition of it, and by far the best of the three, is the beautiful one, Valencia, 1780, folio. See the Prólogo to this edition for the mistake by which Pulgar’s Chronicle was attributed to Lebrija. [292] Read, for instance, the long speech of Gomez Manrique to the inhabitants of Toledo. (Parte II. c. 79.) It is one of the best, and has a good deal of merit as an oratorical composition, though its Roman tone is misplaced in such a chronicle. It is a mistake, however, in the publisher of the edition of 1780 to suppose that Pulgar first introduced these formal speeches into the Spanish. They occur, as has been already observed, in the Chronicles of Ayala, eighty or ninety years earlier. [293] “Indicio harto probable de que falleció ántes de la toma de Granada,” says Martinez de la Rosa, “Hernan Perez del Pulgar, el de las Hazañas.” Madrid, 1834, 8vo, p. 229. [294] This important document, which does Pulgar some honor as a statesman, is to be found at length in the Seminario Erudito, Madrid, 1788, Tom. XII. pp. 57-144.